Diplomacy in Black and WhiteJohn Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance

Ronald Angelo Johnson

The first history of the unlikely diplomatic alliance between the fledgling nations of the United States and Haiti

Reviews

“Ronald Angelo Johnson’s Diplomacy in Black and White offers a new, compelling, and highly readable account of an important episode in the early history of American foreign policy.”
—Michael Mandelbaum, author of Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government

“John Adams’s presidency and Saint Domingue’s revolutionary regime rarely get the attention they deserve in explaining the acquisition of Louisiana and shifts in the slavery debates in the United States. Ronald Angelo Johnson’s carefully argued and persuasive new book gives us an illuminating take on the equal partnership forged between the Adams administration and Toussaint Louverture—a fascinating and original study of diplomacy across the color line.”
—Nancy Isenberg, author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr

From 1798 to 1801, during the Haitian Revolution, President John Adams and Toussaint Louverture forged diplomatic relations that empowered white Americans to embrace freedom and independence for people of color in Saint-Domingue. The United States supported the Dominguan revolutionaries with economic assistance and arms and munitions; the conflict was also the U.S. Navy’s first military action on behalf of a foreign ally. This cross-cultural cooperation was of immense and strategic importance as it helped to bring forth a new nation: Haiti.

Diplomacy in Black and White is the first book on the Adams-Louverture alliance. Historian and former diplomat Ronald Angelo Johnson details the aspirations of the Americans and Dominguans—two revolutionary peoples—and how they played significant roles in a hostile Atlantic world. Remarkably, leaders of both governments established multiracial relationships amid environments dominated by slavery and racial hierarchy. And though U.S.-Dominguan diplomacy did not end slavery in the United States, it altered Atlantic world discussions of slavery and race well into the twentieth century.

Diplomacy in Black and White reflects the capacity of leaders from disparate backgrounds to negotiate political and societal constraints to make lives better for the groups they represent. Adams and Louverture brought their peoples to the threshold of a lasting transracial relationship. And their shared history reveals the impact of decisions made by powerful people at pivotal moments. But in the end, a permanent alliance failed to emerge, and instead, the two republics born of revolution took divergent paths.

Ronald Angelo Johnson is an assistant professor of history at Texas State University. He has served as a U.S. diplomat at embassies in Gabon and Luxembourg, and he has worked as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. He is also associate minister at Mount Olive Baptist Church.